Eyeball Kicks: Eleanor Davis’s “Why Art?”

Eleanor Davis, who lives and works in Athens, Georgia, doesn’t have many books to her name, but she’s widely hailed as one of the most interesting young cartoonists working today. (I published her first book, “Stinky,” ten years ago, while she was still a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design.) In her latest book,“Why Art?,” a squarish object whose almost clinical cover depicts a color image framed by monochrome hands, Davis takes as her subject the cartoonist’s unique process of creation. At first, she turns the tropes learned in art school into a series of humorous cartoons. (Color, “the most basic category of artwork,” is illustrated by black-and-white cartoons, and size is shown by line drawings.)

But later in the book the hand of the creator intervenes. In Davis’s telling, the creator is an all-powerful being who can twist a house between her fingers, destroy creation in a flood, and remake it from a doll figure in her own image. Rivers flow, flowers bloom, people kiss, and children are born. We’re absorbed—and implicated—in the excitement of the creative process.

Cartoonists who draw and invent stories each day—be it George Herriman, of “Krazy Kat,” Charles M. Schulz, of “Peanuts,” or Saul Steinberg, at The New Yorker—get to tap their subconscious for our delight. In “Why Art?,” the audience is buffeted by the constant back and forth between Davis and her art, but we’re allowed, for an instant, to linger in the liminal space between created and creator. It’s a rare and perfect vantage point.